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Filipino can hardly be innocent. In McCullers’s many works, she is
interested in black-white relations in the South; however, this time
her interest in an Asian rather than an African American servant
indicates her cosmopolitan concern and her awareness of the rise
of the United States as a world power. Not merely a Southern
writer, McCullers, aware of American colonialism in the Pacific
between 1898 and 1945, creates this fascinating character Anacleto
to allow her to critically engage the interrelations of nationalism
and sexuality. The presence of a Filipino in the incipiency of
America’s nation building discloses the empire’s ambivalence and
menaces the authoritative discourse of colonialism that entails an
investment in heterosexual patriarchy as the signature of
hegemonic whiteness.
Depicted as a perpetual boy who looks supernaturally ageless,
Anacleto exhibits a cert -ain stage of arrested development and, in
a symbolic sense, can never obtain full citizenship insofar as the
idea of citizenship is based on the white norm of heterosexuality.
In the eyes of U.S. imperialism, the Philippines constituted a queer
nation, in the sense that it could not be articulated by dominant
definitions of nationhood as the product of militarism and virility.
As a diasporic queer of color shamed every day for being a
subjugated and racialized subject, Anacleto, however, refuses to
lose his self-respect. He delights in embracing his role as a queen to
provoke the men around him. His artistic sensitivity and
involvement with high culture set him apart from the vulgar,
masculine society around him. Although Michael Bronski argues
that gay men’s involvement with high culture (opera, ballet,
painting, literature) is a way to gain some acceptance by the
mainstream society, we cannot deny the fact that culture is
attractive for queers because it provides a way out of the dreary,
heteronormative reality (Bronski, 1984: 12). Culture is beautiful,
sensuous, and fun; it, as David Halperin puts it, affords gay men
“an imaginative point of entry into a queer utopia, somewhere
over the rainbow, which is not entirely of their own making”